bias

This is stuff regular readers likely already know, but it’s nice to have links to stuff for others. Two recent op-eds from the NYT discuss how decision makers in a wide range of gatekeeper roles are more likely to make discretionary accommodations for some people than others while not noticing that this is what they’re doing:

When vos Savant politely responded to a reader’s inquiry on the Monty Hall Problem, a then-relatively-unknown probability puzzle, she never could’ve imagined what would unfold: though her answer was correct, she received over 10,000 letters, many from noted scholars and Ph.Ds, informing her that she was a hare-brained idiot.

When science heroes have a documented history of treating some kinds of people badly, their glorification by science fans can be alienating for members of the groups those heroes treated badly.

[I]t is dangerous to rest your scientific outreach efforts on scientific heroes. […] Science outreach doesn’t just deliver messages about what science knows or about the processes by which that knowledge is built. Science outreach also delivers messages about what kind of people scientists are (and about what kinds of people can be scientists).

I spoke to a guy in a long coffee queue to point out there was another, unused machine 3 feet away, and even bearing news of speedy caffeine, and wearing a bright red dress, I was apparently invisible.

A woman at a tech event, unaccompanied by any men, is just too unlikely to be believed.

I may have contributed to a new term for a rhetorical ploy we see more and more. Here’s how it happened – I’m rather proud of this coinage, but wonder whether we may be reinventing the fallacious wheel. Is there an already apt term in rhetorical jargon?

It is very frightening that many, perhaps millions of people’s understanding of addiction has been grossly perverted by a fraudulent book that started its life as an overt work of fiction. So says my old mate Kev, over at Sufficient… Read More ›